Monday, July 24, 2006 |
13:32 - Money in the bank, that's right, a bank full of money
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The lunch conversation today took a turn down the iPod Accessories aisle. Specifically, I was wondering what's stopping the competing MP3 player makers from adopting Apple's Dock connector, the 30-pin, all-singing, all-dancing plug of the world.
I believe a big factor in the iPod's entrenchment in the market is the huge, multi-billion-dollar iPod accessory market. Companies like Griffin, Belkin, DLO, and a dozen more have all embraced the Dock connector as a published standard upon which to build their devices, from microphones to radio tuners to voice recorders to USB data bridges to Bluetooth adapters and everything else under the sun. Because all these things have standardized on the iPod's characteristic connector, you now see the whole industry as "iPod accessories", not just "MP3 player accessories". When you go to an electronics store, you head down an aisle that has the word "iPod" in its name, filled with all these toys that are explicitly—and exclusively—made for the iPod. Just seeing that kind of ubiquity is a psychological factor that further entrenches the iPod brand every time you encounter it, further establishing the idea that the iPod is "it": the gold standard, the Kleenex of MP3 players, and everyone else is an also-ran that's locked out of the gigantic accessory market.
But why? What's stopping Creative and Microsoft and iRiver and everyone else from using the Dock connector?
If they did, then the accessory makers would be able to advertise their wares as being "for iPod and all other MP3 players too"—and that would only increase their sales. Surely the accessory companies would jump at the chance. And if they did that, the whole accessory market would no longer be iPod-specific—the "iPod aisles" in stores would have to become "music player aisles", dismantling the iPod's de facto name ubiquity—and why wouldn't the competing MP3 player makers want that? They've got to know what a big bulwark the established iPod accessory market is against their success in breaking into the mindshare of the consumer base. Anything that combats it, it seems to me, they'd want to be a part of.
Unless it's just a "Not Invented Here" thing: We don't want to use Apple's connector standard. Which I guess I wouldn't put past them. But isn't that a dumb reason not to make a move that would net them a whole ready-made accessory market equivalent to the iPod's, essentially overnight?
The iPod competitors would probably instigate a lawsuit from Apple if they came out with music players that had iPod-compatible Dock connectors on them—but Apple would lose, because they certainly haven't guarded the Dock connector's schematics from the public, and even more certainly haven't fought back against every accessory maker in the world using those published schematics to make their own plug-in devices. Why would a Zen with a Dock connector be legally any different from a Belkin voice recorder that plugs into the bottom of an iPod? Who's to stop the Zen and the Belkin device from fitting together, other than the companies themselves? Do Apple's competitors hate Apple more than they like money?
The argument that Apple's standards are proprietary get more and more feeble with each iPod sold and each iTunes track downloaded. If the manufacturers who cling to "PlaysForSure" as a badge of openness and impartiality have any interest in securing a lasting legacy, it would be a pretty smart first move to use the public information that all the accessory makers have been freely using all this time, take a page from the history books that include VGA, RS-232, USB, FireWire, and Mini-DIN, and standardize on the Dock connector as the latest ubiquitous, cross-platform, infinitely useful connector design to unite the industry.
Time's running out for them to get a serious foot in the door.
UPDATE: I'm told that all the legit accessory makers have to sign an Apple NDA in order to find out how to interface with the software driving the connector, which presumably means that Apple wouldn't offer any such agreement to a rival manufacturer even if they wanted to jump on the bandwagon.
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